Catholic Heritage

THOUGH uncompromisingly contemporary in design, the church of St Mary MacKillop in the parish of Keilor Downs and Kealba is rich in Catholic imagery—and it is not there just for decoration, writes Christopher Akehurst.

“The Catholic faith is not only a set of propositions to which we give assent in the mind, it is a visual faith, a faith of images that illustrate what we believe.”

In these words Mgr Charles Portelli, parish priest of Keilor Downs and Kealba, explains the principle that has guided him in building and furnishing this striking church, St Mary MacKillop, one of the most remarkable in the Archdiocese of Melbourne.

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He tells an anecdote of several primary school students he overheard looking at a painting of the Assumption newly hung in the church. “Who’s that in the middle?” asked one. “That’s Mary going up to Heaven,” said another. “And who’s the old guy up on the cloud?” “That’s God.” “I get it. So Mary went up to God when she died.”
 

“The painting,” says Mgr Portelli, “illustrates a doctrine that, purely intellectually, might not be so easy to comprehend.”
 

Images are an essential part of catholic culture, but, says Mgr Portelli, catholic culture is something younger generations are disconnecting from, even in a parish of largely European-descended families such as Keilor Downs. Filling the church with sculpture and art, some of it antique, much of it of great beauty, is a way of asserting traditional catholic culture in the hope that people in the parish will find they can relate to it.
 

St Mary MacKillop was completed (though there are still a few additions Mgr Portelli wants to make) in 2004. It is a large, unashamedly contemporary building, steel-framed with concrete infill, almost industrial in the simplicity of its structure. Yet its plan represents a return to tradition. After several decades of new churches planned like fans with pews on three sides of the altar, St Mary MacKillop is on the basilican plan with nave and side aisles. Its only structurally decorative elements are the internal columns with their capitals modelled on those designed for coventry cathedral in England in the early 1960s and a rose window six metres in diameter high above the altar.

The budget to build St Mary’s was $2 million. “For that,” Mgr Portelli was told, “you can have an outside or an inside, not both.” He opted for the inside, so that when you pass through the porch the interior of the church speaks to you in a language quite different from the unadorned functionalism of the exterior. Works of art of Baroque and Gothic richness glint and glow against the plain background of the walls, which act as a foil to their beauty.

Behind the main altar is a Lady chapel with pews running lengthwise in what is called collegiate style. A tall Gothic-detailed free-standing tabernacle stands in an arch linking the chapel with the main church. It has two sets of doors: one at the front facing into the main church; and at the back, facing into the Lady chapel, a second set that open to reveal a built-in monstrance used frequently for Adoration.

This is a ‘personal’ church, in that it reflects the interests and taste of its priest (“a frustrated architect”). Mgr Portelli is an indefatigable retriever of ecclesiastical art, much of it removed from churches and chapels during ‘reorderings’ here and overseas.

Among the treasures acquired for St Mary’s is a small timber altar in the Lady chapel that belonged to the Empress Eugenie of France, a set of eight superb Gothic candlesticks from the Good Shepherd convent in Abbotsford, and a vast hanging crucifix originally brought from England for the Anglican cathedral in Bendigo but never installed. Also from an Anglican church is a fine 19th-century eagle lectern in brass.

The 1930’s font in a restrained Art Deco style was retrieved from a presbytery garden where it served as a birdbath. Stained glass in the rose window—12 roundels with images of the Apostles—was rescued from a monastery in Sydney.

Not all the art in St Mary MacKillop is old. The stations of the cross and several statues of saints are modern Italian and Spanish. Perhaps the most striking sculptural works are six panels in bas-relief depicting the Passion and resurrection, sculpted by Italian artist Augusto rannochi. They are in the slightly ‘brutalist’ style popular in the 1960s yet are subtly beautiful in their texture and use of light and shade. These have been set into the new main doors of the church, which were dedicated at Pentecost.

St Mary MacKillop is at 152 Odessa Avenue, Keilor Downs, 3038. The parish, established in 2007, incorporates the former parishes of St Mary MacKillop, Keilor Downs, and St Paul’s, Kealba.

Photos by Fiona Basile/Kairos Catholic Journal
Photo 5882 courtesy of  St Mary MacKillop Parish, Keilor Downs.